There is admin work that feels really soul-sucking. You know, the kind of stuff like having to enter numbers in a spreadsheet that you feel nobody will ever use. 

A practical example I've witnessed was about a person that had to enter some statistics about the usage of a local service which was part of a much bigger organisation. That person really felt that this work didn't make any sense. "Nobody ever reads that data". So I took a minute to show to that person where that piece of data was used. It was used in a report that allows the organisation to apply for funding by showing the total impact of its work. Sure, the local number is just a tiny portion of it, but bringing everything together makes for a compelling case.

Explaining the reason why something exists is a good first step. But what if the organisation, from time to time, would tell that frustrated worker: "Hey, thanks for doing this boring admin work. Here's what you helped us do with your work". In such a message, the worker could discover the impact of her boring work visually. Suddenly what was soul-sucking becomes a task with a lot of meaning, even if it's still a little bit boring (1).

There are two additional things to consider for this kind of boring tasks. If it can be automated, automate it. And if you can't find why it makes sense to do this task, then you should just remove that task.

This is a first draft of a principle that might end up in a book of the "Service Design Principles" series.